


Re: Security Breach and Janet Reboot Protocol

by elegantstupidity



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Afterlife Bureaucracy, Afterlife Worldbuilding, Error Messages, Gen, Investigative Report, Janet Development Team, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:31:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25210168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/pseuds/elegantstupidity
Summary: ATTN:High Judge Hydrogen;The creators of Light, Darkness, and Everything in BetweenURGENT! READ ASAP!NOT A JOKE THIS TIME!(Janet's error reports had to go somewhere.)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 46
Collections: Unconventional Fanwork Exchange 2020





	Re: Security Breach and Janet Reboot Protocol

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heartbeatstumbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbeatstumbles/gifts).



> I suggest reading this on something wider than a phone screen, but it should be readable on all devices.

Carbon  
Lead Janet Engineer

Afterlife Public Works and Special Projects  
Janet Development Team  
Office of Janet Support and Maintenance

PH EXT: 0004  
EMAIL: bonnie@janetdevteam.neu

**ATTN:** High Judge Hydrogen;  
The Creators of Light, Darkness, and Everything in Between

**URGENT! READ ASAP!**  
**NOT A JOKE THIS TIME!**

**Re:** Security Breach and Janet Reboot Protocol

* * *

**Brief**

So, there's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that in a scheduled semi-millennial audit of all Janet architecture—including the Cloud-Farm, Inter-Ja-Net infrastructure, and individual system inspections—the Janet Development Team found that nearly all operational Janets across all Places and Zones are working at optimal levels.

This Engineer would like to point out to anyone actually reading this (Which, as a side note: I really hope you're not ignoring this report, Gen. Just because the last three or six hundred were pranks cooked up by the software developers because their latest project got scrapped doesn't mean that this one is too. They have been thoroughly reprimanded and no longer have access to the fax machine anyway.) that these results are none too shabby for a department that oversees the operation and maintenance of more than 4 million units Afterlife-wide. In the eternity since the Janet Development Team has existed, we have never had cause to initiate an actual investigation of any glitch, error, or crash. Well, until now.

Because that's the bad news. Our audit revealed an anomaly. A big one.

First, we discovered that a Good Janet, serial number 4D1625C (I'm just calling her "Janet" after this because there's no way I'm going to remember that), that had never been assigned to a Good Place Neighborhood and wasn't even supposed to have left the Warehouse, had been activated. We discovered _that_ because we found a cache of more than 15,000 error reports she'd sent the Support and Maintenance Office. Which, yes, is a lot of error reports.

What's important, though, is that among these errors was documentation of more than 800 hard resets in the course of about 300 years. In case you didn't read the user manual you received when Janet first launched (yeah, I know you use it as a coaster, Gen), when a Janet resets, her Interpersonality Software automatically updates, making her a little better than she was before. This was supposed to cut down on repeat error reports from Architects—which, I have to point out, has generally worked. Unfortunately, in this specific instance, Janet's high reboot count resulted in a heretofore unseen level of complexity and independence in a 25th Generation unit.

On its own, this is not exactly ideal. If we wanted to test the bounds of a Janet's capabilities, we definitely would have done it under supervised, regulated conditions. That's not the kind of hypothetical to mess around with just because someone thought it would be funny. Not that we'd ever do that at all! Anyway, we'd want trained programmers and engineers on hand to marbleize as necessary. I mean, there's a lot of ways an omniscient, semi-indestructible computer interface can go when she starts developing what can only be described as a sense of self. I mean, do we get a HAL or a KITT? (Speaking of, remind me to add a tweak to Janet's in-built wheelies to the project pipeline.)

Combined with what we discovered upon further investigation, though...

It's possible we've uncovered the biggest threat to Afterlife Security since the spawn of the Niednagel.

* * *

**Investigative Protocol**

Needless to say, we have never had to investigate a glitch of this magnitude before. Add that to the fact that we couldn't even be sure that this behavior _was_ a glitch—Janet's Beg For Mercy Protocol kicks in whenever her kill switch is approached, and it's... effective. Pretty brutal, in all honesty. In theory, it should be impossible to trip her kill switch accidentally or remotely, but given how many times this Janet had been reset, we couldn't automatically rule it out.

All of which is to say: we're not exactly equipped here in the Support and Maintenance Office to be launching sweeping investigations like this.

We did our best, okay?

I appointed myself as the lead investigator, not because I wanted a break from the latest code push on Bad Janet's Fart Archive, but because I felt that as the Lead Janet Engineer, and therefore the senior member of the Janet Development Team, I could offer unique insight into a Janet's optimal operations. Well, that and no one else would do it.

I enlisted a Neutral Janet as my research assistant. She can recall information faster than I can search for it myself, and this seemed like an excellent opportunity to test the recent updates to the Inter-Ja-Net.

I would love to tell you that after making these personnel decisions, everything went along perfectly smoothly, but in the interest of transparency, I won't. I'll send my notes on the investigation along if you really want them, but they're not pretty. Maybe you could get someone from Accounting to write us up some sort of step-by-step investigation guide in case we ever have to do this again. Because, man, I do not think this is the way investigations are supposed to go, even if we did end up uncovering almost all the relevant information. And that's what matters, right?

* * *

**Findings**

We began our investigation by questioning how this particular Janet, which was not scheduled to even leave the warehouse until the opening of Neighborhood 3141P with the next wave of Good Place admits, was activated at all. Obviously, an unactivated Janet can't send in error reports complete with audio and visual files or be rebooted once, let alone 800+ times.

While much of Janet's data remains in the Cloud-Farm—some of it might also have been lost in that freak numberstorm a Bearimy and a half ago; we've really got to figure out a way to strip out imaginary numbers from re-entering the data supply—much of it encrypted, we did gain access to her basic back-up, which includes information like her primary user, neighborhood manifest, popular locations, and error log. From this, we discovered that she'd been activated by an architect named Michael and brought to Good Place Neighborhood 12358W.

"But wait!" you say. "There _is_ no Good Place Neighborhood 12358W!"

Yes, I am quite aware.

When asked if they'd moved forward on a new Neighborhood without notifying us—I mean, yeah right, but it didn't hurt to check—the Good Place Committee replied:

> While we would love to accommodate your request for this information, unfortunately, it is against our best practices to send information about individual Neighborhoods or Architects without filing the appropriate paperwork. Please fill out the attached Neighborhood Demographics Request Form and the Employee Record Requisition Form, submit them to the appropriate subcommittee, and we will get back to you within the next 7-10 business months.

We still haven't heard back.

Which, ultimately, turned out to be okay, because Janet's APS tracker was one of her few features that didn't develop some kind of bug. Even though her registration specs listed her location as Good Place Neighborhood 12358W, analysis of her actual Afterlife coordinates revealed her to be in the Bad Place.

How the Bad Place had managed to get their hands on proprietary Good Place technology, I have no idea. (Although, the fact that the Janet Warehouse doesn't have any kind of security measures in place might have something to do with it.) Clearly, though, they had managed it and somehow got her operating in the wrong Afterlife Realm for reasons that still remain a mystery to me. I have a guess, but it seems like a complete longshot. I mean, it's certainly possible, and a lot of the data that we do have backs it up, but introducing a Good Janet to humans in the Bad Place to trick them into believing they're actually in the Good Place? It all seems a bit, well, _visionary_ for eternal beings who haven't ever bothered to change their playbook.

It'd be much easier to believe that demons had somehow gotten hold of a Janet and were having fun making her glitch and watching her Reset Deterrence Protocol before hitting the switch. It would be much easier to clear up, too. We'd negotiate for Janet's release, and I could get back to the code push my whole team has been complaining about. Case closed.

Except, I had a few lingering suspicions. (And I really did not want to listen to any more of Bad Janet's gas attacks.)

Turning my focus to the information that we could actually retrieve, namely, Janet's error log, I thought there might be more to the story. Considering the log contained more than 15,000 reports, there had to be.

(Why these error messages were allowed to build up to such unmanageable levels isn't really important, is it? The Development Team has a lot on its plate, what with work on the Disco Janet Beta still ongoing and tweaks to Bad Janets being sent out hourly. Plus, Good and Neutral Janets average about four errors every 6000 years; data from Bad Janets were excluded from this calculation based on the high incidence of prank reporting. We had no reason to suspect we'd need to check the error inbox for at least four more Bearimies. Plus, the monitor for that inbox was integral to the Team's weekly karaoke bonding.

P.S. Are you getting our invitations? You never RSVP.)

While the error log certainly gave us more information, and was therefore better than the nothing the Good Place Committee gave us, it didn't shed much light on the actual problem. Because a reboot wipes all of Janet's memory, the data that would reveal who kept murdering this Janet was erased before it could enter her memory banks and automatically upload into her running back up in the Cloud-Farm.

We did identify four humans, as well as who we believe to be the Architect Michael, who featured in many of the error reports, but we have no way of telling who they actually are. The audio and visual evidence attached to each error report means we know what they look like; if they walked into the office, we'd recognize them right away. But because of the way Janet’s data is encrypted and stored, it’s impossible to match error-inducing requests to the identity of the user who made them. By design, a user’s data—requests and search history, for example—is completely private, even from the Architect of their Neighborhood.

And, as it turns out, the Janet Development Team. Can’t say we really saw using each Janet as her own encryption key coming back to bite us in the ass. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Anyway, I got to work scouring through Janet's error log, which revealed a multitude of novel glitches—including 42 straight summoning and retrieval errors, each resulting in one of several genera of the family Cactaceae rather than whatever had been requested—as well as wholly unprogrammed behavior. I'm talking things that the Janet Development Team hasn't even begun to dream of. New lines of code and whole applications were discovered in the System Settings of her backup, which our team has only just begun to make heads and tails of. None of our systems are equipped to run these new applications, but we believe that they are the underpinnings of an emotional interface.

Hopefully, I don't have to point out to you that Janet was not designed to experience human emotions.

It was immediately clear to me that a majority, if not all, of Janet's repeat errors resulted from the implementation of this untested, likely highly unstable, interface.

But, since I couldn't do anything to shut down these new programs remotely—all of our early attempts to make contact were met with an Inter-Ja-Net Connectivity Problem; which shouldn't be possible if the Janet in question is anywhere in the Afterlife, but I hadn't yet made that realization—I could only try and figure out how this interface developed or who installed it, and to what purpose.

While it's possible the Bad Place had inserted some kind of virus into Janet's programming to interfere with her functioning, that only made sense if sabotage was their motivation. And while I imagine the demons would definitely enjoy wreaking havoc on the Good Place, they'd never tried to interfere in other Realms before. This would have been a complex, highly-experimental first overture.

No, the only thing that made sense was Janet's unprecedented number of resets.

After consultation with Neutral Janet's databases, it was determined that since the 25th generation of Janets was pushed, there have been fewer than four hard resets across all operational Janets. No Janet has ever been rebooted more than once. Frankly, we thought the whole "begging for her life" routine would keep anyone virtuous enough to make it into the Good Place from trying to reboot Janet, and until now, that has been true.

Now why is this important? you ask. As I explained earlier (if you actually read it, Gen, and haven't just binged another season of Scandal), after a reset, all Janets automatically update their Social Awareness algorithms, which is housed in the Interpersonality Software. This update increases Janet's ability to provide for the human inhabitants of her neighborhood and typically cuts down the likelihood of triggering repeat errors that could lead to another reboot. Basically, Janet gets a little bit better every time she comes back from being murdered.

When this happens once, it's good for everyone involved. Janet doesn't have to send in another error report, the humans don't have to deal with unpredictable outcomes from their Janet, and we don't have to dispatch a team from the office to go check out the problem in person.

When Janet makes spontaneous improvements more than 800 times, however...

Honestly, I haven't even begun to predict how many ways it could all go wrong. I mean, a highly emotional, omniscient vessel of knowledge and creation on the loose in the Bad Place? We're talking the possibility of bending and reshaping the fabric of reality as we know it. With emotion in play, truth becomes relative, which is utterly incompatible with a Janet's ultimate purpose, to serve humans by providing them access to the absolute truths of the universe.

Having made this discovery, it was of the utmost importance that we find this Janet and bring her back to the Development Team for further study. It's easy to make that decision, not so much actually accomplishing it. Perhaps you remember that our early attempts to get a ping on Janet's location or make some form of contact were all met with Inter-Ja-Net Connectivity Problems; we couldn't get so much as the Walkie-Talkie Mode to initiate. There can be lots of explanations for a Janet to go offline—maybe she's got lint stuck in her Inter-Ja-Net Port—but given how many other issues this particular Janet has experienced, it seemed naive to assume there was an ordinary explanation for this.

As it turned out, this turned out to be an accurate assumption because Janet wasn't just offline. She'd disappeared from the Afterlife entirely.

That was the only explanation I could come up with for why, after 300 years of steady error messages, all communication from Janet would simply stop. We've received no reports—not even her standard system analyses—in at least a year and a half. Even when she was being reset on a semi-regular basis, we received those system analyses, meaning it's unlikely that Michael or the other demons figured out how to opt out of that feature. If they hadn't figured it out in 300 years, I didn't have much faith that they'd gotten it now. The only thing, barring a brute-force infiltration of Janet's reporting systems, that stops a Janet from sending her routine reports is Marbleization. However, unlike resets, all Marbleizations trigger an alert that gets filed with the Office of Janet Decommissions.

Well, at least it was much easier to get a straightforward answer from them than the Good Place Committee. According to Decommissions, while there was a spate of Janet Marbleizations and other meltdowns in the Bad Place recently, Janet 4D1625C remains in operation.

If that's the case, then the only explanation for such an extended period of offline operations is that Janet is no longer in the Afterlife.

I know it sounds ridiculous. A Janet leaving the Afterlife? Where would she go? Well, the only place she could go is Earth. Her systems would certainly be offline there. We'd have no way of getting in contact or pulling her current system reports. It all fits. Well, not everything, exactly. When reached for comment on whether or not anyone has recently gone through the Door to Earth, Jeff the Doorman said he had "no idea what we were talking about. Why would he let a Janet and an architect follow some humans around on Earth?" A little on the nose, don't you think?

So, let's recap. What started as an investigation into how and why a Good Janet was activated prematurely led us to the discovery of a theft from the Janet Warehouse by demons to the cause of a huge number of operational errors and glitches ended up with the discovery that Janets are, in fact, capable of disrupting the very essence of their surroundings if someone decided to reset them enough times. Not bad investigating for a software engineer and a Neutral Janet, even if she declined to wear the deerstalker or hold a magnifying glass.

* * *

**Evidence**

About this Janet X

**Janet** : _Good_  
Version: 25.802.0

**Serial Number:** 4D1625C  
**Primary User:** Architect Michael

Overview Display Options System Settings Neighborhood Specs Request History Error Log

**SummoningRetrieval X**

**SummoningRetrieval encountered a problem.**

You were asked to summon "the file for [REDACTED], born in [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED]." You have summoned "a cactus."

Please report this problem to the Janet Development Team. An error report has been collated with the audio/visual input from your surroundings immediately before this problem occurred.

Send Error Report Don't Send

**Hardware X**

**Alert! Hardware malfunction detected!**

The connection to your right thumb has been interrupted. If you are currently in possession of your right thumb, please make sure it is firmly attached and initiate a connection test by humming an A♭ for three seconds.

If you are still having connectivity problems, please send a report to the Janet Development Team.

Send Error Report Don't Send

**Objectivity Engine X**

**Objectivity Engine encountered a problem.**

It appears you are trying to disseminate information incompatible with objective truth. The statement in question is:

"I am very happy for the both of you."

Please amend your language to align with the principles of truth and fact to prevent possible consequences to your system operations.

Amend Proceed anyway

**ObjectPermanence X**

**ObjectPermanence encountered a problem.**

Sector 2AL.08 of Neighborhood 12358W disappeared for 22.87 seconds.

Please report this problem to the Janet Development Team. An error report has been collated with the audio/visual input from your surroundings immediately before this problem occurred.

Send Error Report Don't Send

**Void Operations X**

**Void Operations encountered a problem.**

The independent entity file "Derek.jan" contains 97 potentially catastrophic errors. You may not be able to open this file outside of the Void. Corrupt files can affect the integrity of the Neighborhood's foundation. Would you like to save anyway?

No Yes

* * *

**Conclusion**

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you. Simply put, a Good Janet should never have ended up in the Bad Place to begin with. Not only was never programmed to operate within the Bad Place (then again, the dev team never programmed a failsafe to ensure no Good Janet could operate within the Bad Place, so that might be on us), but she was designed with the disposition of her end users in mind. A human in the Good Place could be trusted not to callously murder a Janet 800+ times, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me. Not true for pretty much anyone in the Bad Place.

Had Janet never been stolen from her Warehouse, none of this would have happened, and the Janet Development Team wouldn't have lost our karaoke nights to security upgrades for the next twelve Bearimy dots. At least.

Our suggestions:

  * Add physical security 
    * This seems pretty obvious to me. I mean, if Janet had never been stolen in the first place, none of her errors or, frankly, possibly terrifying evolutions would have been possible. How hard is it to put a security camera in the warehouse? A guard dog? A lock? Some quicksand, even? Anything would be better than the current _nothing_ keeping the integrity of our hard work safe.
  * Add digital security 
    * It shouldn't be impossible on our end to add some kind of alarm to Janet's reboot system. A reboot would not only automatically initiate a social awareness update, but would also send a push notification to the Janet Development Team, alerting us to the reset. This would allow us to keep better track of where and when Janets are rebooted, though without also amending Janet's Privacy Policy, we'd have no way of knowing who was responsible.
  * Software updates 
    * We could always remove the post-reboot Interpersonality update to head off any future iterations of this problem... But is that really necessary? We put that measure in for good reason—this situation aside, every Janet reboot we have on record could be tied to some Weird Sex Thing (Matt in Accounting has got a report if you don't believe me), and a boost to Janet's social awareness is never remiss in those cases—and it's only been exploited once as far as we know. If Janet doesn't automatically upgrade after a hard reset, our office would be faced with a flood of new error reports when the issue that prompted the reset inevitably reoccurs. Honestly, that would just be a huge pain. 
      * Incidentally, frustrated programmers are prank-y programmers. I couldn't guarantee that you wouldn't be inundated by a slew of new memos from my team, and I know how much you love those.



My final suggestion is this: put someone else in charge of any future security investigations. This is so beyond my paygrade, it's not even funny. (I mean, considering I haven't been paid ever, so really, isn't everything is beyond my paygrade? That's not _not_ a hint.) I have been programming Janets since the dawn of existence. I'm good at it. While, yes, sometimes I would like a break from it, I'm not really cut out to be a gumshoe. Even if I were, Neutral Janet does not make for a very fun sidekick.

Really, you should count yourself lucky that I actually wrote this report up at all. Speaking of which, it is well past the time that I get back to my team. I shudder to think about what kind of nonsense they've gotten into while I was tied up doing this.

Cordially,  
Bonnie, Lead Janet Engineer


End file.
